I'm currently working on a new Object datastore built on DBM::Deep that will provide near-transparent persistence for objects. While this won't scale into the Ebays of the world, it will do nicely for 90% of the apps that currently use an ORM.
If you're interested, I can have an alpha version up in a week or so.
My criteria for good software:
Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?